Torreya Park Holds Surprises For Those Willing To Look For It This Is One Of A Series Of Stories Suggesting Florida Weekend Possibilities.

January 31, 1988|By JONATHAN SUSSKIND, Travel Writer

TORREYA STATE PARK -- Up a brick walkway, past a white picket fence and around the corner of a restored 1850s cotton plantation house is one of the oddest sights in Florida.

A bluff.

Yes, this is still Florida. And yes, that`s a cliff, overlooking a valley and a river bend, 150 feet below.

The view is perhaps more befitting an Appalachian Mountain ridge, but Torreya State Park has a few more surprises for the visitor who makes the worthwhile drive 50 miles from Tallahassee.

It is home -- just barely -- to the torreya tree, one of the rarest trees on Earth, found in North Florida and a few spots in California, Japan and China.

``The torreya tree was just about wiped out by a blight in the early 1970s,`` park ranger Hubert Griffin says. ``There are some small ones coming up. Torreya is also called gopher wood, and as you may remember in the King James Version of the Bible, Noah`s ark was built of gopher wood.``

The park is also home to rare plants, animals and insects found in the lushly forested ravines that twist down the bluff to the flood plain of the Apalachicola River. Scientists make regular treks to study the unusual wildlife, Griffin says, and have even named a butterfly found only there after the park. The Florida yew and the national champion big-leaf magnolia tree are in the 1,065-acre park. Deer, beaver, bobcat, gray fox, turtles and more than 100 species of birds can be seen by the quiet and patient hiker.

The house, though, is not a park native. It was built by slaves in 1849 across the river at Ocheesee, on the 4,000-acre cotton plantation of former Carolinian Jason Gregory. Constructed of heart pine, the two-story house has 10 fireplaces and high ceilings and large windows to admit cooling breezes from the river.

Life on the Gregory plantation was not like a scene from Gone With the Wind, though. With no window screens or insect sprays, mosquitoes plagued the residents, spreading malaria and yellow fever. The house sat on brick pillars 5 feet high, but even that measure could not keep it safe from occasional floods on the Apalachicola, which was not dammed upstream as it is today.

Jason Gregory lost the house in a tax auction after the Civil War and moved his family to Gainesville to establish another successful plantation with his former slaves as sharecroppers. He never returned to Ocheesee, but a few years later bought back part of the land. His youngest daughter moved back to the homestead in 1900 and lived there until she died in 1916, after which the house was abandoned and became a hobo hotel. ``Why it was not burned to the ground is a mystery,`` a guidebook says.

Then in the 1930s, the Civilian Conservation Corps disassembled the mansion, board by flood-rotten board, floated it across the river to the park site and restored it to a semblance of its original condition. The furnishings are not original, but they are of the style the Gregory clan owned in the 19th century, says Jerome Bracewell, the park ranger who leads 30-minute tours of the home at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. daily, hourly on weekends and holidays, at a price of $1 for adults.

Torreya is one of five original state parks built by the CCC in the 1930s, and it is also one of the most scenic. Millions of years of erosion by the Apalachicola and the streams feeding it shaped the bluff and steep ravines. During the Civil War, a Confederate battalion manned a battery of six cannons hidden in the forest ravines, protecting the river from Union gunboats.

Seven miles of trails loop down the bluffs and ravines, past the Confederate gun sites, to the natural levees of the river and to two primitive camping areas.

One of the trails, the Apalachicola River Bluffs Trail, is a National Recreation Trail and leads to two primitive camping areas, one overlooking the river and the other on a creek. Both areas have latrines and fire pits, and campers must register with the park office and pay a fee of $1.50 per night per person.

The other trail, Weeping Ridge Trail, starts at the developed camping area and leads to a deep ravine and a trickling waterfall. The developed camping area has sites for recreational vehicles, campers and tents, barbecue grills, fully equipped bathrooms and a meetinghouse with benches and tables for meals. There is also a youth camping area with bathrooms and fire circles.

On both trails, hardwood trees tower above undergrowth of ferns, needle palms and wildflowers. From late October through early December, the foliage bears evidence that there is indeed a place in Florida where fall colors sparkle. In the spring, wildflowers dot the greenery that covers the ravines like a thick carpet laid on a bumpy floor.

At all seasons, warm yellow rays of sunlight stream through the branch canopy and light up clouds of mist, dust and tiny insects. Looking up from the trail at the bottom of the bluff, one imagines being on the floor of a huge terrarium.